THIS WEEK: Hot, Threads and Jaws

 The daily average temperature  this past week was 0.08 F warmer than any other of record-keeping.  

• The average global air temperature in midweek was, however, 62.9 F.  You say, but that's pretty cold.  Sure, but you're also averaging in the Arctic and Antarctic, etc.  

• 
  Why so hot?  Said to be a combination of global warming, summer and the advent of El Niño.  And it should get even hotter into next month.

• 
  Europe suffered its hottest June, ever.
• It's winter in the Antarctic, but parts of this continent and nearby ocean were 18-36F higher than the 1979-2000 average.
• 
  2016 was the hottest year ever, when we faced the last major El Niño.
• Chances are high that this month of July will be our warmest ever.  According to Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, ever means since the Eemian interglacial period 120,000 years ago.

• 
  UN Secretary General António Guterres said, if we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation, as the last two records in temperature demonstrates.  He was referring to the two all-time highs this past Tuesday and Wednesday.

I will soon post on Twitter vs Threads, but the latter was launched by Meta this past week, and within two hours Wednesday evening 2 million people downloaded the app, a copycat to Twitter.  

• Mark Zuckerberg reported Threads reached 30 million users in less than 24 hours.

• 
  Instagram took 15 months to reach 30 million downloads, and TikTok took two years.
• Sign ups surpassed 70 million by Friday morning, and users posted more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes.  

• 

  Threads might have been #2 to Nintendo's Mario Kart Tour.
• Keep in mind that Twitter has 368 million users.
• 
  Elon Musk hinted that Meta stole trade secrets.
• Zuckerberg took a swipe at Twitter by saying Threads would be "focusing on kindness."

• 
  Early adopters of Threads include Bill Gates, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey, along with brands like Netflix.
• Will Threads become a Twitter-killer?  Stay tuned.

• 
  Nothing to do with an app, but the most frightening film I might have ever seen was Threads, which I reviewed three years ago.  Here is my monthly gift to you.  Click on this and you can watch the entire 2 hour movie.  But you might not want to do this.  Here is one quote:  I saw this first in the 1980s and had nightmares for some time afterwards. It is a horrible movie, not in the sense that it's badly made -- it's definitely not -- but it pulls NO punches. Unlike "The Day After", there is no reasonably clean hospital scenes ... no rosy hope that somehow we will make it past a nuclear war, regroup, and rebuild. This makes that old saw very clear: after a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.

Also just this week in Florida, a video showed beachgoers fleeing the ocean after a shark started circling swimmers in shallow water. 

Over the past week I've watched almost the entire Jaws series, and have just begun Jaws the Revenge, given 0 and 15 ratings by Rotten Tomatoes.  Michael Caine and Mario Van Peebles are in it.  The headliner was Lorraine Gary, who was the wife of the sheriff in the original.  Not sure if I'll ever complete this one.  Jaws III, incidentally, got 11/17, II 62/30 and Jaws an outstanding 97/90.  Stars were Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton.  Steven Spielberg directed.

-